Tag: Stuff Worth Reading (Page 1 of 16)

Currently, my people and perverse culture, our hybrid language and history, is all I can seem to write about, and are the stories I think I should be telling. This isn’t a claim that writers should stick to their own parts of the world, but that there’s a correlation between what we run from and why we’ve run from it, our personalities and the organic ways we manipulate language when we speak to those who know us best, and stories with a heartbeat.

Writing is some strange magic and we are foolish to try to understand it—the how, the why, the when—but writers try all the same.

It’s a numbers game. They say in baseball, a hitter can fail seventy percent of the time and he’s still a Hall of Famer. The odds seem worse for writers. Failure is a frustratingly large part of the game, at every level, from brainstorm to publication.

The variables are many, and there are countless ways to fail. Yet there is one common denominator: writers write.

The details beyond that—fascinating as they may be—are nearly irrelevant.

What the novel says, I think, is that any single event is the result of many, many things. That’s why you have the hundreds of pages leading up to the climax; those pages suggest the philosophy that you can only fully understand that climax and its significance if you know a whole lot about all the things that led up to it… The short story says something different—not contradictory, but different. The short story suggests that any single moment or detail, in some sense, contains everything: the characters; their problems and promise; the significance of the events; human nature, more generally; the past, the present, and the future.

Here’s my point: Writers rarely know who they are as writers. Well, if you grab hold of one of the most insightful ones and ask them, they might be able to articulate who they are in that particular moment. At that moment they’re obsessed with coming-of-age stories, maybe, or they only believe in first-person narrators, or everything they do is stream-of-consciousness. But that’s only who that writer is for that one particular moment. That one fleeting moment. And only a fool would decide that that’s how things have to be forever.

Actually, each one of us can do anything. We are not limited to one defining thing.

I write for two hours every day. When I burrow into an uninterrupted state, and succeed in ignoring the infinite distractions at my fingertips, the practice of it makes me better for it. Seems obvious. But the locked in time plus repetition is what produces. Reading, of course, helps too. I know that when I am reading I want to write more. I know that when I’m writing I want to read more. Words beget words. You’ll never get through them all, and thus you’ll never run out. I find a great deal of comfort in that.

“I am ever bullish on the book industry, because I think that people like to hear stories, and books remain one of the great ways in which to tell them. And as everything else gets faster, quicker, shorter, smaller, people look for balance in their lives and want to turn to books for a broader context, deeper context, a sustained narrative.”

Failure in writing is not:Still having a lot to learn.Reaching a certain age and not being published yet.Unexpected things getting in the way of writing.Watching other people succeed while you don’t.Needing a break now and then.Finding this hard. It is hard.

“I think the problem here isn’t the writing – it’s you. You’re expecting a product without respecting the process. I’m not interested in getting something perfect from you, and you shouldn’t be either. Just do the work. Write the story. And then write it again, as many times as you need to.”

Mistakes are essential to human progress and personal development, so why do I keep telling myself I’m not allowed to make any?

As a young girl of color, Star Trek was the first place I can remember seeing myself represented. Through characters like Uhura, Sulu and Geordi LaForge, I saw people that looked a little like me — that shared the first thing people notice about me, a darker skin color — and for the first time understood that I could achieve anything, even serve on a starship. I, and people who looked like me, existed in this future. It was one of the major forces that shaped my childhood and the adult I have become.

But still, nothing could have prepared me for the moment when Yeoh utters those first words. I personally do not speak English with an accent… But my parents, immigrants to this country, speak with an accent, though they’ve lived here the bulk of their lives.

It’s hard to put into words what it feels like to watch a thing you so badly want to love and, all of a sudden, being emotionally devastated (in the best way possible) because they included you in such a seemingly effortless way. When you’re used to having to fight for every small morsel of representation you get, having it granted without even having to even ask, and in such a thoughtful way, is overwhelming.

It’s easy to forget that Hemingway and the rest went to Paris because it was cheaper than staying at home, and that it was cheaper because a catastrophic war had just laid waste to the continent. These writers produced so much material about each other, in fiction and in letters, that they accidentally crystallized a specific time and place in the American imagination as the essence of what a creative life looks like.

This fantasy image does us a disservice. It leaves us with no model to follow when we try to integrate art-making with functional lives. That period when a person could make a living writing fiction for periodicals was a blip, and it’s over; we’ve long since returned to the baseline, which is that the vast majority of fiction is written around and beside a whole lot of other work, and it’s the other work that pays the rent. As such, there is no writer’s lifestyle; your lifestyle is determined by what that other work is.

Those of us who are lucky enough to be living this fairly obvious reality can feel at times like we’ve failed. I have the pleasure of my work, but where’s my glamor? Why doesn’t it look the way I thought it would when I was 14? The cruel edge on the bohemian fantasy is that it pretends that leisure can be had for free. As every adult knows, leisure takes capital.

Setting aside the catalog fantasy means being able to interrogate the idea that the writer is always observing, standing at the edge of the party, never unpacking all his suitcases or renewing his lease. Most writers are, in fact, as deeply rooted in their communities as anybody else. But that’s hard to picture. … How would it look if we pushed that rootedness to the center, valorized it, acknowledged it as the norm?

If I were speaking to my 14-year-old self, who had already fully assimilated the writer-lifestyle-fantasy from various sources, I would say this: First of all, good news. You’re going to write books. Second, you’re going to spend very little time on terraces or piazzas of any kind. … The important thing is, though, that you will get to write.

In Offill’s original book: a young mother and ambitious writer, committed to her daughter and to her writing, tries to find energy and ambition for both; she must claim for writing the authority of necessity that usually attends parenthood. Art-making, unlike the great bourgeois panoply of family life, comes without society’s automatic sanction, and is in some ways hostile to it.

But her plan “was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” … The “art monster” lament is a recurring theme. In a way, it is the novel’s true subject, and a steady source of pain: thwarted aspiration, a sense of life as a slow lapse from high ambition. The narrator was twenty-nine when she finished her first book, and now the head of the department where she teaches creative writing is asking her where the second one is.

I’m lucky to have part-time childcare, and every time I get to go to a café, or close my bedroom door, and sit down at my laptop to work, I have the highest of aspirations. But all too often, when those precious hours have ticked away, I have little more than half-starts and disjointed scraps to show for it.

It is difficult, and it feels unfair, and I worry about sounding like a broken record, when I talk about not having enough space for myself and my art now that I’m mother. It is not actually my intention to complain. I fully recognize and appreciate that I am in a better position than most. But still, this is my reality. That’s all I’m saying.

I should also clarify that even before motherhood, I was not the best at managing my time. Motherhood is not to blame for my lack of discipline. But it hasn’t helped, either.

Anyway, I am currently at work on a Young Adult novel about family secrets, architecture, and falling in love. I started this story just before becoming pregnant with IB. Who knows when I will finish. Last year I had a sort of crisis of faith, and so I took a break from the book, experimenting with other ideas in my queue, giving myself permission to write “just for fun,” partly to see if I even knew how to do that anymore. I did. I do. And reminding myself of it allowed me to see that there could be fun in this story too. My faith was renewed, and I recommitted to the manuscript.

LIFE

On nice days, we take IB to the zoo. That’s our thing now. We’re definitely getting our money’s worth out of our membership.

She walks all over the zoo grounds like she owns the place. Not bossy, but confident, curious, exploring. Tireless. It makes me so happy.

She likes to people-watch, and I wonder what she thinks about everyone.

She also waves and says hi to the animals. It’s painfully cute.

Though the weather started trending warmer in April, we still got a few random snow days, and on one of them, I made a tiny snowman for IB. She wasn’t sure what to think of it. But she really enjoyed tromping around in her boots.

Later, Andy made her this snow bunny. She kept saying, “Hop hop,” whenever she saw it. And then, after it melted and collapsed, “Uh oh!”

Now spring is truly here, and while I’m not looking forward to the heat, I do love spending the afternoons and evenings outdoors with IB, picking wildflowers, splashing in water, and just generally kid-ding around.

The lesson of The Feminine Mystique was not that every woman should quit the burbs and go to work, but that no woman should be expected to find all her happiness in one place — in kitchen appliances, for example. And the lesson for my discontented friends is not that they should ditch their professional responsibilities but that they should stop looking to work, as their mothers looked to husbands, as the answer to the big questions they have about their lives. “I think possibly work has replaced ‘and they got married and lived happily ever after,’ and that is a false promise,” says Ellen Galinsky, co-founder of the Families and Work Institute. “Everyone needs to have more than one thing in their life. We find people who are dual-centric to be most satisfied. If people put an equivalent stress on their life outside of their job they get further ahead and are more satisfied at their job.”

We forget that time is not just a ticking clock but a life constantly filling with experience that we bring, like gifts and offerings, to the page.

Relish the words, the story, the process. Be kind to yourself and your fellow writers. It costs so much to write, and for each of us it costs something different, but we keep doing it because we are proven, time and again, that it is worth it.

Before getting pregnant, I worried that motherhood would take away from me. Take away time, take away energy, take away ambition, take away creativity. Now, eighteen months in, I know that motherhood does indeed take a lot — but it gives a lot too.

I truly believe that motherhood can make my work deeper and richer. And on top of everything else, I want to make IB proud.

My parents were here for a week to celebrate the holidays with us and IB. Everyone except the baby was sick to some degree, and the weather has been amazingly cold, but other than that, it was really nice. I love watching my parents with my child, and vice versa. Their bond warms my heart in a way that’s hard to explain.

Late-night binge-watching

I took advantage of the extra help with IB, and the lack of obligations, to indulge in staying up late and catching up on a couple shows in my queue.

Earlier this year Netflix released the 6th and final season of Longmire. I can’t even remember why I started watching this show, but I do know that the compelling cast and characters, along with the unique setting — small town Wyoming, near a Cheyenne reservation — quickly won my interest.

(Oh wait, just remembered: I think I started watching because of Katee Sackhoff, who I loved in Battlestar Galatica.)

This last season of Longmire brought back a lot of past storylines that I didn’t fully remember, but I managed to catch on quickly enough. The plot was less important to me than the characters anyway, and from that standpoint, I found the conclusion to be quite satisfying. The final episode in particular did a great job of closing the loop on the emotional arcs that have been building over the past six years, yet still setting each character up for the next chapter of their story.

As a woman, and as a mother, Vic’s traumas touched me deeply. As did her resilience and growth.

Speaking of womanhood, motherhood, and trauma… Big Little Lies was intense. Phenomenal in every aspect — writing, acting, music, mystery, atmosphere — the show turned a keen eye on the lives and troubles of privileged women. The little ways we cut each other down. But also the little ways we care for one another, and build each other back up.

If I may offer a compliment and a warning all at once: The depiction of an abusive relationship was masterful, important, and profoundly uncomfortable at times.

My only disappointment in BLL was with its lack of diversity. Here’s hoping they find a way to remedy that in their second season.

All we can do to create change is work hard. That’s my advice: Just do what you do well. If you’re a producer, you’ve got to produce. If you’re a writer, you’ve got to write. If you’re in corporate America, keep working hard to bust through the glass ceiling. If you want our voices to be represented in government—and I think we’re all getting behind that idea now—encourage women to run and help them with their campaigns. If you are one of those people who has that little voice in the back of her mind saying, “Maybe I could do [fill in the blank],” don’t tell it to be quiet. Give it a little room to grow, and try to find an environment it can grow in.

Unlike many writers, I don’t do daily word counts or weekly page counts (too much pressure for something as fragile as writing), and I try not to get fixated on writer friends posting about their productivity on social media. Instead, when I’m working on a book or short story, I’ll ask myself a few simple questions before I go to bed at the end of the day: Did it get better? Am I farther along than I was yesterday?

If the answers are yes, then I consider that a successful writing day.

I had aspirations of a certain kind of life—personally and professionally—that seemed to hinge on specific goals. If I can just finish this draft. If I can just sell this book. If I can just, if I can just. You think these landmarks are going to solve your problems, or give you some sort of deeper solace. But they don’t. That’s why it’s better to wait without hope. At least, that’s my reading of the line. To let go of the dream that something or someone will come along and magically solve everything. That’s a form of vanity, or a form of fear. It’s the wrong thing to hope for.

I taped these lines over my writing desk because they’re also a powerful reminder about staying in the moment, deep inside the work, without worrying about some future result.

I don’t write every day. It ebbs and flows. But when I have a project that I’m working intently on, I tend to write at night. I think it gets back to that same word: stillness. The world starts to fall asleep. The emails stop coming in. The phone and texts go quiet. Even social media slows down. It’s almost like there’s more energy in the air for me to access. From 11 p.m. until 2 or 3 in the morning, that’s when I write my best stuff. You feel like you’re doing it in secret. That nobody is watching. All around you, people are dreaming. You can almost get yourself into a dream-like state. That’s much harder to do in the middle of the day.

“When people who’ve historically held positions of privilege feel their privilege threatened, or like they won’t get a ‘free pass’ anymore, they can sometimes perceive that as reverse discrimination rather than an evening out of the playing field.” – Sandhya Menon

About Me

Writer. Halfie. Feminist. Lives for good food, laughter with loved ones, and adventures big or small. Born and raised in Texas. Resides in Ohio. Dabbles in design and photography. Repped by Tina Dubois at ICM.

About Me

Writer. Halfie. Feminist. Lives for good food, laughter with loved ones, and adventures big or small. Born and raised in Texas. Resides in Ohio. Dabbles in design and photography. Repped by Tina Dubois at ICM.